This is an amazing book. My friend Danny Cox gave it to me some years back. He told me I would love the history, and I did. But I loved the humanity more.
Jim Newton is an amazing guy. He did amazing things in his own life, but in this book, he shares short profiles great people that he's known. Here are people you've almost certainly heard of like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Charles Lindbergh and Dr. Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912 and also authored a bestseller about Humanity and the Environment.
These are portraits of great people who have done great things, but they're not the kind of biographical portrait you see in most other books. There, the usual treatment is to recount the hero's exploits and speculate on the reasons for greatness, or to show us the great person growing up, developing and achieving success. Then of course there's expose that shows us how our hero has feet of clay. Newton does something different from all of those.
What Newton is able to do is to give us Edison turning off his hearing aid, Harvey Firestone sitting down at table with Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh taking a bit of vacation on a boat. He lets us see the private moments of fascinating people, but there's more.
Because Jim Newton knew all these folks and they knew each other he can offer us a unique perspective. He's able to give us how they related to each other and how they thought about things -- not just "whatä they thought about things, but "how.%
This remarkable book is an excellent supplement to any biographies or histories you may have that cover the people involved, but it's also a delightful book to dip into from time to time, to help you remember that no matter how great they are, great people are people, too.
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Created/Revised/Reviewed: 24 August 2002
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